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How to break into homes (using an iPhone)

When I broke into my neighbour's home earlier this week, I didn't use any cat burglar skills. I don't know how to pick locks.

I'm not even sure how to use a crowbar. It turns out all anyone needs to invade a friend's apartment is an off switch for their conscience and an iPhone.

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This was done politely: I even warned him the day before. My neighbour lives on the second floor of a Brooklyn walk-up, so when I came to his front door he tossed me a pair of keys rather than walk down the stairs to let me in. I opened the door, climbed the stairs, and handed his keys back to him. We chatted about our weekends. I drank a glass of water. Then I let him know that I would be back soon to gain unauthorised access to his home.

Less than an hour later, I owned a key to his front door.

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What I didn't tell my neighbour was that I spent about 30 seconds in the stairwell scanning his keys with software that would let me reproduce them with no specialised skills whatsoever. The iPhone app I used wasn't intended for anything so nefarious: KeyMe was designed to let anyone photograph their keys and upload them to the company's servers. From there, they can be 3-D printed and mail-ordered in a variety of novelty shapes, from a bottle opener to Kanye West's head. Or they can be cut from blanks at one of KeyMe's five kiosks in the New York City area.

Parking valets suddenly require a ludicrous level of trust.

In any of those cases, a skilled lock hacker could recreate the key from the photos alone, using increasingly accessible tools like 3D printers, milling machines, or laser cutters. One group of researchers created a project called Sneakey in 2009 that showed they could reproduce keys photographed from nearly 200 feet away and at an angle. In other words, simply leaving your keys hanging from your belt presents a security problem, not to mention letting someone get ahold of them.

That means apps like KeyMe and KeysDuplicated haven't exactly created the requirement that our physical keys be kept as secret as our digital ones. But they have democratised the security threat:

Now even a lockpicking noob like me can demonstrate the danger of letting keys leave their owner's control.

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In a way, says Weyers, that's a good thing. "The effect of services like KeyMe will be positive: People are now starting to understand that it only take a couple of seconds to duplicate a key," he says. "We lock nerds already knew that. Now the normal public is catching on."